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As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

thewalrus.ca

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Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#651

Post by backlava12 »

sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

The combination of mass SEO spam/slop and Google's intentional lobotomization of search has lead to it being next to useless. I also strongly suspect Google censors topics at the whims of various government agencies (this was very obvious during COVID and leading up to the 2024 election).

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#652

Post by satvikpendem »

frabcus wrote: post #257
satvikpendem wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you cancel and go to another provider, rinse and repeat. This is already what is happening with streaming platforms.

Not after it consolidates, monopolises and enshittifies, no you can't.

Piracy.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#653

Post by satvikpendem »

queenkjuul wrote: post #113
satvikpendem wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot can use any model like Sol or Opus and is just a harness so not sure why people say this.

Personally it's because i used it when it was brand new and work paid for it and i had no idea what model it was using, my boss just turned it on for automatic PR summaries and code reviews and it was universally dogshit, and the auto complete in my IDE was awful as well.

Well it's much better now.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#654

Post by backlava12 »

Good4boothee wrote: post #233
marcd35 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has already begun the effort to start poising the well - https://www.reddit.com/r/poisonai/

Isn't that effort totally redundant? As in - plenty of people are already filling entire internet with slop for SEO purposes? And LLM slop by default is a mix of facts with few plausible but made up facts - it might be harder to craft such perfect poison on purpose.

Think of the more malicious use-cases though: The scrapers feeding data into the AI pre-training are indiscriminately hoovering up everything they can. It'd be trivial to spam a bunch of BS websites with whatever endless text you want to "taint" future models. Post tons of examples of insecure code, publish package.json files pointing to some malicious library, etc...

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#655

Post by satvikpendem »

intended wrote: post #401
satvikpendem wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People write and create regardless of profit motive, it has been that way for thousands of years.

I had a flippant answer which was “who ever wanted to write for a machine in the past thousands of years” But maybe that is the future. Every country starts erecting their own towers of babel that we talk at, and it constantly compresses our conversations down to the most effective distribution of weights. At some point talking at the machine becomes a high status job, and we give respect to the people who whisper to…

They don't write for machines, they write for themselves.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#656

Post by sgt »

OCTAGRAM wrote: post #456
shoobiedoo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filt…

There are retrocommunity sites. DOS, OS/2 (eComStation, ArcaOS), Amiga (Apollo Vampire), Mavericks Forever. Amiga is quite alive community. If I am to write game, I consider this platform. Steam game will be lost in 100.000 games, and Amiga game will be noticed. There is I2P. They have been disabling scripts for ideological reasons, so there were many websites without scripts. I have used quite exotic Charon web brow…

Good point on Amiga. It's truly a vibrant community, still. I follow Amiga Bill and Retro Hour etc.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#657

Post by sgt »

kaoD wrote: post #371
sph wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I suggest you to look into mesh networks? I am a huge fan of Reticulum. Using it feels like being a pioneer, the scene is very welcoming. The pitch: it is network-agnostic. The same mesh network runs on the Internet or through LoRa radios or any other physical layer than allows the exchange of data packets. It scales from private networks to global meshes. It's the wild west. People are excited, and eager to grow…

I always find these mesh networks landing pages a bit lacking in information, and I wish they weren't. How is this different to, from example, Yggdrasil Network[0]? https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Makes me think of good old Yggdrasil Linux.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#658

Post by nunez »

bluebarbet wrote: post #543
erfgh wrote: post #341

AI has killed reading-anything-written-after-AI for me. Due to this effect it is probably the worst invention in human history or pre-history.

Am I really the only one who doesn't care whether or not prose was written by AI? Assuming that a text is signed off on by a person, then surely what counts is its substance, not who or what actually strung the words together. I'm constantly surprised by this obsessive need to falsify what is unfalsifiable. And among nerds of all people. It feels religious, like a modern form of heresy-purging.

I care because in most (not all) cases, (a) AI UGC is one- to few-shotted with no concern for accuracy or readability, and (b) why would I read the results of someone else's prompt if I can achieve more or less the same result for free on ChatGPT?

For example, I was searching for a guide for realigning the v-brakes on my wife's hybrid bike and found this: https://volatacycles.com/how-to-adjust-bike-brakes-rubbing/

Now, this is for disc brakes, so not applicable in my situation. I've never ridden a bike with disc brakes, so I can't vet for the accuracy of this guide. Maybe it's totally right; I'm sure someone reading this will know.

However, just look at this article! Zero pictures for a process that _really_ needs it. It just drones on. Imagine following this guide only to discover that the 12-15 Nm rotor torque the article is asking for is actually too high!

A similar article from before AI would at least have (stolen) pictures describing the process. It would also very likely be shorter. Which creates the rub: if I know how to write something engaging and correcting AI's copy will take _just as much time_ as writing it myself, why would I use AI to do it?

In short, AI content is lazy content. My time is valuable and finite; if I'm reading your stuff, I want to know that you at least tried to give a shit about my time as a reader while producing it.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#659

Post by satvikpendem »

Grimburger wrote: post #130
neuralkoi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen websites put up some draconian measures to try and get a grip on the scraping. So much for the sub-second loading experience when you have Cloudflare, Google, Anubis, and all these other captcha services trying to see if you're a human. It's made the web browsing experience so much worse. Some of the proposals to address this include charging bots for access to web resources, but they will also have repercu…

Cloudflare specifically has a block for LLM and AI training bots now. Not sure of the effectiveness but it's there.

While they themselves announced an AI bot, the irony is palpable. In reality they just want to control who gets access to what, themselves excepted.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#660

Post by [deleted] »

joenot443 wrote: post #494
Maken wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's a pool for human use, the worst case is a bacterial/fungal infection due to incorrect filtering.

A pool filter is for removing physical debris, it's not really for preventing bacterial or fungal infections. I guess what you're talking about is sanitizer, in my case we use chlorine. I test it every time we swim, but I wouldn't have needed an LLM for that. It's very straight forward to maintain pool chlorine, my Dad taught me that when I was 13.

[deleted]
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